Archive for October, 2009

Motorola has taken the back seat lately in the cell phone market that not too long ago it was the undisputed champion of. For many years the Razr was the most popular cell phone on the market, but since the advent of the iPhone and the plethora of iPhone wannabes like the htc Touch, Dimond, LG Vue, Blackberry Storm and Palm Pre, Motorola has been far behind in innovating a device to compete in this new touch-screen market. Although Motorola has several touch-screen phones, none has really been successful. Now enters a possible contender, the Motorola Droid. Using the highly anticipated Google Android 2.0 OS and housing a full QWERTY keyboard, Google-powered voice-activated search, a 550MHz processor, and a 3.7-inch with 480×854-pixel resolution, 5-megapixel camera with flash, autofocus and video capture, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi. Couple that with exclusivity to the largest 3G network in the US, Verizon. The Droid seems to have all the right stuff to give AT&T and Apple a real challenge. Verizon has been blasting the TV with a very flashy iDon’t commercials bashing the iPhone’s lack of some basic features like “iDon’t have a real keyboard”, “iDon’t support open development”, “iDon’t customize” and “iDon’t take night shots”. The big question is, can this phone really be the salvation of Motorola who has had a bad financial track record recently? I guess we will find out soon enough. The Droid go on sale November 6th for $199 at Verizon.

Many T-Mobile Sidekick users are understandably angry due to a recent service outage. The reason for the outage according to T-Mobile is a “Server Glitch” at the Danger a Microsoft subsidiary that owns the cloud based server storage service used by the Sidekick. Now the news this weekend that comes from both T-Mobile and Danger/Microsoft is that as many as a million users may lose some or all of the cloud based server data like contacts, photos and other personal information.

The Sidekick support forums at T-Mobile are buzzing with all the posts of users after more than a week of service outages and now the data loss. One vocal Sidekick user has reportedly been banned from the public support forums after voicing his opinions of his displeasure of losing his personal/professional data including 300+ contacts, 20+ notes and 30 tasks. The individual said he ran his entire business and personal life on the Sidekick. He commented that he was so angry that he was thinking of contacting the Washington State Attorney General’s office to lodge a formal complaint.

What concerns me most about this issue is how it is possible that there was no way according to Danger/Microsoft to recover the lost data of all of these people? According to them, the glitch on their servers destroyed all the data. I would think that a company like Microsoft would go to any length to prevent such a loss of data.

This all begs the question on the reliability of cloud based computing in general. With the recent outages for cloud based services like Google gmail, Amazons Simple Storage and Citrix GoToMeeting, many personal and professional users of cloud based services may need to rethink the value of these services if the service providers cannot guarantee their reliability. I personally would never put my trust in storing my personal or professional data in the cloud with all the potential there is for theft or loss. With my luck, some hacker would try to crack my account then go to town trying to find something of value to pawn. When they realize I have nothing of value to them, they delete my stuff just for fun!!

Maybe I’m a little paranoid, but with all security flaws being found out there that open the doors to hackers to get information of value, it is just a matter of time before they figure out how to hack the cloud to services like this to make money from it.